19th century Australian police and commercial photographer

Prisoner Nathan HUNT 1870s-1890s

Nathan Hunt, Tasmanian prisoner and habitual offender, transported to Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) as a teenager (b. ca. 1822) in 1842 on board the “Elphinstone”, was sentenced with multiple convictions for larceny thereafter and was still serving a sentence in prison in 1890, aged 68 yrs. He was photographed here at discharge by Thomas J. Nevin on 28 February 1879 at the Hobart Gaol.

This later photograph of Nathan Hunt taken by Constable John Nevin was printed in the earlier format of a mounted carte-de-visite portrait typical of his brother Thomas’ commercial method of printing his 1870s mugshots for the Municipal Police Office and Hobart Gaol. Nathan Hunt’s age given on the criminal record sheet is 57 yrs old, yet by 1890, Nathan Hunt would have been much older. His age was listed as 65 yrs old when he was discharged on 13 February 1884, and this later photograph certainly shows a man of about that age who has spent a lifetime in and out of prison. He was 57 years old in 1879 (see police gazette notice above), so it can be assumed that an earlier photograph had been pasted to the blue criminal sheet and then removed, to be replaced with the cdv of Nathan Hunt aged, photographed in 1890, aged around 68 years old.

The first and much earlier photograph, therefore, of Nathan Hunt, was taken in the mid to late 1870s, when he was in his fifties and when he was frequently in and out of prison serving sentences for up to two years for his favorite past time – larceny.

This last photograph is only the third of four mugshots to surface of a Tasmanian prisoner wearing a prison issue cap; the earlier mugshots taken by Thomas Nevin of prisoners James Mullins and William Smith at the Hobart Gaol in 1875 show both men wearing the “black leathern cap” manufactured by prisoners at Port Arthur in 1873.

But Nathan Hunt, and another prisoner, Ernest Parker, also convicted in 1890, were photographed at the Hobart Gaol wearing a third type of prison cap made of canvas with a small visor, and with numbers stamped on the front, viz:

Thomas J. Nevin (1842-1923)

Professional photographer Thomas James Nevin snr (1842-1923) produced large numbers of stereographs and cartes-de-visite within his commercial practice, and prisoner identification photographs on government contract. His career spanned nearly three decades, from the early 1860s to the late 1880s. He was one of the first photographers to work with the police in Australia, along with Charles Nettleton (Victoria) and Frazer Crawford (South Australia). His Tasmanian prisoner mugshots are among the earliest to survive in public collections, viz. the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the Tasmanian Heritage and Archives Office, Hobart; the Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasman Peninsula; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; and the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Thomas J. Nevin's stereographs and portraits are held in public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland.

John Nevin snr (1808-1887)

Soldier, journalist, teacher and poet John Nevin snr (1808-1887). in the Royal Scots 1825-1841

Disclaimer

We have not voluntarily contributed to any publication which supports the misattribution of Nevin's prisoner/convict photographs (300+ extant) to the non-photographer A.H. Boyd, nor do we condone any attempts by public institutions or private individuals to co-opt the work on these Nevin weblogs and associated sites to apply the misattribution.

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